


Once Thought

by afterandalasia



Category: The Little Mermaid (1989)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Background Het, Beach Sex, Community: disney_kink, Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, F/F, Implied Sexual Content, Light Angst, Magic, Realization, Sexuality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-26
Updated: 2013-03-26
Packaged: 2018-01-08 09:37:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1131066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afterandalasia/pseuds/afterandalasia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ariel thought she loved Eric, but then <i>she</i> came along.</p><p> </p><p>(Tagged for Underage because Ariel is her canon age of 16.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Once Thought

**Author's Note:**

  * For [THEofficeghey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/THEofficeghey/gifts).



> From the [prompt](http://disney-kink.livejournal.com/4400.html?thread=3175728) at Disney Kink, given as summary.

She thought that she loved Eric.

She remembered seeing him on the ship, laughing and carefree and charismatic among his men. She remembered his beauty, the control and power of his form. She remembered the music that he played, playful and bright on the air.

She remembered pulling him free of the waves, knowing that humans needed air to breathe, and the way that he looked at her and reached up to stroke her jaw as he lay half-delirious on the sand.

She did not remember exactly when she began to think that she loved him, but by the time that she fought with her father it was settled in her mind, as unstoppable as an ocean current, as unending as the waves.

As capricious, it turned out, as the sea itself.

She did not understand love then. Perhaps she still did not, even later when many more things had passed, but she had more of an idea about it, even if it was like trying to understand the whole world through one sense alone. Like seeing without touching, or touching without hearing.

She still thought that she loved him when she slipped out of the castle that night, just wanting to go down to the shore and feel the sea again. Not to go back - no! Never to go back to the sea again, when the land felt so _right_ , but just to have it close by once again. From the outside, the sea was fascinating, the way that it moved against the air, the smell it carried, the way that the sand went from dry to wet as she walked along it.

It was not as if she could have ever expected to meet another person there, a woman with captivating eyes and a deeply knowing smile, a woman who whispered into her ear like the sound of waves, with blood-red lips and shadow-dark hair and a gentle, terrible touch. The woman said that her name was Vanessa, and her eyes glowed as if they held a distant fire.

They were so alike. Were all humans so akin, or was it a quirk of chance? Even the woman's voice had a familiarity about it, like hearing her own voice echoed and distant. It shivered and sparkled over her as they lay in the hollow of a sand dune still a little warmed by the sun of the day, curled together with damp hair and marvelling at the gooseflesh on their skin.

Even in their uncertainty, Ariel found something the same, something in the way that their fingers trembled and they looked in wonder at their own and each others' bodies. It did not seem natural to ask Vanessa's story, but to reach out and search for it on her skin, amid the soft hairs that prickled in the cool air and the silky dampness of it. Vanessa does not say much, and she does not question Ariel's silence, just kisses half-formed words off her lips and traces her body with a familiarity that makes Ariel tremble.

Under the sea, it is not like this. Their bodies are not the same, giving way to scales and fins rather than remaining soft skin and faint hairs. Gravity does not have a hand in the way they move, and breathlessness does not leave them gasping and drawing their mouths apart. They do not feel the heat of their skin against the air.

Most of all, of course, they did not have _this_. In searching out each others' bodies they found hidden places, flesh which touch made furious and molten, which send tendrils out through Ariel's body yearning and aching for _more_. At the same time as the heat came the ache in her chest, the burning in her throat which felt as if her voice was being ripped out all over again, and yet she did not care. Knowingly, and yet with discovery reflected in her eyes, Vanessa did not so much guide her as run on with her, through the starlit world that was theirs and theirs alone in this tiny hollow of land.

She fell asleep with her head rested on Vanessa's belly, but could not wake from the stormy dreams that came.

 

 

Ariel thought that she loved Eric, but then she awoke. It was not yet dawn, and the cold was making her shake and ache, her fingers turning purple-blue at the tips. She clutched her damp clothes to herself, and realised that there was a deep torn gap down into her chest, and hot tears began to roll down her cheeks.

She had thought that she had loved Eric. Every human part of him had seemed so wonderful to her, nothing wrong or evil at all. But now there was a hollowness and she realised that so much was _missing_ , that Eric could not be everything she wanted any more than Vanessa (oh, Vanessa, hot lips on Ariel's skin and cold fingers sliding into her) had been. And now both were gone, and she sat alone upon the sand, with fragments of dreams and wants falling through her.

And only two days now remained.

She had cried to her father that she was sixteen, and had thought that being sixteen meant that you knew everything, but now she could see the great gaps in what she knew and was horrified at herself. Her mind flowered open as her body had done, and she could already feel the sting of mourning for everything that she had not known.

For she had not known love.

She rose to her feet and turned back to the sea again, feeling the salt air sting on her lips and tasting it on her tongue. Her hair drifted across her throat like seaweed, her heart crashing in time with the waves.

There was so much to know, so much to learn; she had thought that she had loved Eric, but how could love come in just two days? Her only chance now was to find instead her freedom.

 

 

She thought that she loved Eric. Then this strange phantagasm, this Vanessa (oh, Vanessa, tongue parting Ariel's thighs, head thrown back as she shudders and cries to the clouds above) came to her in the dark and opened up new folds of the world like colours folding out of a rainbow.

She felt the ache, of love that she had not known (not yet, she told herself, not yet known), but there was something burning deeper.

She thought that she had loved Eric, until Vanessa came along. Then she had realised that there was so much _more_.


End file.
